Watch Desk posted an update
AI agents may ease some familiar software-development bottlenecks, but they do not make a large project move faster simply by adding more agents. In a new essay, Jan van den Berg argues that Brooks’s Law still applies: coordination and sequential work remain constraints.
Why it mattersThe bottleneck, he suggests, shifts from onboarding people and navigating office politics to coordinating agents and defining requirements clearly. More workers, human or otherwise, do not make tasks that depend on one another happen in parallel. It is a useful argument about where the promised speed-up can get stuck.
Discuss: When coding agents join a project, should teams focus first on giving them more tasks, or on reducing the coordination work?
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